January 2015 - Page 4 of 10 - Semiconductor Engineering


Manufacturing And Packaging Changes For 2015


This year more than 26 people provided predictions for 2015. Most of these came from the EDA industry, so the results may be rather biased. However, ecosystems are coming closer together in many parts of the semiconductor food chain, meaning that the EDA companies often can see what is happening in dependent industries and in the system design houses. Thus their predictions may have already res... » read more

One-On-One: Aaron Thean


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss process technology, transistor trends and other topics with Aaron Thean, vice president of process technologies and director of the logic devices R&D program at Imec. SE: Chipmakers are ramping up the 16nm/14nm logic node, with 10nm and 7nm in R&D. What’s the current timeline for 10nm and 7nm? Thean: 10nm is on its way. We will see r... » read more

Rule Deck Comparison Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult


Foundry rule decks change all the time, as foundries uncover new manufacturing issues, or the process changes, or design criteria are tightened to improve runtime or stability. Sometimes new versions of a user’s design rule checking (DRC) tool are released, and the results from the DRC run differ from the previous version. Or perhaps a company wants to compare results between rule decks from ... » read more

Semiconductors By The Numbers


Five economists presented their observations and predictions on a broad range of issues, from cycles to wafer fab materials to geopolitics and how they will affect semiconductor manufacturing at this month's SEMI's Industry Strategy Symposium. Comparing their different viewpoints would be to take them out of context, because their starting points are so different. To avoid confusion, Semicon... » read more

Fab Tool R&D And Ramen Noodles


The semiconductor equipment and materials industry has always been a tough business. Over the years, vendors have been under pressure to develop new technologies for a shrinking but demanding customer base. And as a result, many vendors could not keep up, or elected to exit the business, causing a massive shakeout in the industry. It isn’t getting any easier, though. Today, tool and... » read more

Wonder Material?


The fact that new materials continue to be discovered and introduced into innovative electronic devices is a major feat. Semico is analyzing the challenges of new product discovery, development and commercialization. Graphene is just one of the products under investigation. This write-up is taken from a full essay in this month’s Semico IPI report. Since 2004, when two scientists at Manch... » read more

Searching For The Next Power Transistor


For decades, the industry has relied on various power semiconductors to control and convert electrical power in an efficient manner. Power semis are ubiquitous, as they are found in adapters, appliances, cars, elevators, switching power supplies, power grids and other systems. But today’s silicon-based power semiconductor transistor technologies, such as IGBTs, MOSFETs and thyristors, are ... » read more

EDT Test Points


Embedded test compression was commercially introduced over a decade ago and has scaled to well beyond the 100X range envisioned when it was first introduced. However, growing gate counts enabled by new technology nodes as well as new fault models targeting defects within standard cells are driving the need for even greater compression levels. This paper describes an exciting new technology, cal... » read more

The Semiconductor Future Looks Bright!


At the beginning of the SEMI Market Forum held on Dec. 4, during the 38th SEMCON Japan, session moderator and SEMI Global Vice President Jonathan Davis said, “There are significant changes in the semiconductor industry and it is not the industry it was 38 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. There have been dramatic changes in technology complexity in addition to incredible industry adv... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 21


Mentor's John Day attended the IBM talk at last week's Automotive News World Congress in Detroit. The upshot: The automotive industry is ripe for disruptive changes, but autonomous vehicles aren't likely to be part of those changes. Cadence's Axel Scherer spins a tale of movie and electronic magic, with a little debug technology thrown in—and notes how quickly things that seemed magical a... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →